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Daily Archives: August 5, 2024

What do people really ask chatbots?

Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “…The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 promised to usher in a new age of artificial intelligence. But until now, we’ve had little insight into how AI chatbots are actually being used in the wild. So The Washington Post looked at nearly 200,000 English-language conversations from the research data set WildChat, which includes messages from two AI chatbots built on the same underlying technology as ChatGPT. These conversations make up one of the largest public databases of human-bot interaction in the real world. Researchers say these conversations are largely representative of how people use chatbots, such as ChatGPT…The Post’s final analysis included nearly 40,000 conversations with WildChat, focusing on the first prompt submitted each day by each user. Here’s what The Post learned about how thousands of people are using chatbots…”

USNewsper.com is not American or News; It’s Lithuanian AI

NewsGuard Discovers AI-Driven Site from Lithuania Using AI to Spread Misinformation About U.S. Politics: “What could be better than getting your U.S. news from “reporting” produced by bots in Lithuania? What happened: NewsGuard has discovered a foreign-backed website using AI and fake followers on X to spread misinformation targeting Democrats after President Joe Biden’s withdrawal… Continue Reading

Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons

Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons. July 2024. Data ProvenanceL General-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) systems are built on massive swathes of public web data, assembled into corpora such as C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma. “To our knowledge, we conduct the first, large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web… Continue Reading

Being an Icon: Reflections on Sandra Day O’Connor

Griffin, Lisa Kern, Being an Icon: Reflections on Sandra Day O’Connor (May 01, 2024). 76 Stanford Law Review (2024), Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2024-44, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4874503 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4874503  – “Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s passing in December inspired an outpouring of tributes to the rancher’s daughter who blazed… Continue Reading

Why “Wisdom Work” Is the New “Knowledge Work”

Harvard Business Review: “Today the workforce is getting older, and the number of younger workers in positions of senior management is growing. These two developments might appear to spell trouble, in that they seem to set the generations against one another, but the author of this article argues that in fact they represent an important… Continue Reading

The olive oil wars

EDJNet – The European Data Journalism Network: “Italy convinced the world that it was the king of liquid gold by selling Spanish oil, but now Spain has appropriated ‘Made in Italy’. With 283 million olive trees, Spain dominates the global olive oil market: in the 2021/22 season, the last one before drought destroyed its harvest,… Continue Reading

ABA Task Force releases report on AI’s opportunities, challenges for the legal profession

The American Bar Association’s Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence released a report today titled “Year I Report on the Impact of AI on the Practice of Law” that details the work of the group over the past year. The AI Task Force, created in August 2023 by ABA President Mary Smith, brought together… Continue Reading

‘Google Is a Monopolist’ in Online Search, Ruling Says

The New York Times [unpaywalled]: “Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in online search, a federal judge ruled on Monday, a landmark decision that strikes at the power of tech giants in the modern internet era and that may fundamentally alter the way they do business. Judge Amit P. Mehta of U.S. District Court… Continue Reading

On Web Typography

My Book On Web Typography – Typography is your design’s voice and the most powerful tool you have to communicate with your readers. Learn how to wield type with care and wit: how to evaluate typefaces, consider technical constraints, create flexible typographic systems, and put together your own collection of favorite faces. Download for free Continue Reading